Portfolio: Brianna Rigg

*Blues in the Blender*, 2017, mixed media installation
[Image description: An installation filling a room with white walls and a gray floor. It is dense with brightly colored materials, some looking like scraps and others— such a a beach chair and a balloon— recognizable objects. The whole installation has an energetic, slightly chaotic feel.]

When looking at San Diego artist Brianna Rigg’s intricate installations, I am reminded of one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read: Italian writer Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. In that 1988 text, Calvino lays out characteristics that he calls “peculiarities of literature”— lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity— and explores their importance in stewarding the future of the written word. These qualities, which Calvino positions as values to guide future writers, move beyond the written word and find exemplary expression in Rigg’s sculptural work.

Rigg’s three-dimensional practice initially arose from her improvisational drawings, which explore the subconscious: her thoughts, echoes of dreams, and desires. Like her drawings, Rigg's sculptural installations convey a hidden self while also offering real spaces for viewers to explore. The constructions are grand in scale and densely built, submerging the viewer and confronting them from all directions. To creates these works, Rigg sources objects of the most varying shapes and colors from thrift shops and discount stores. This process allows Rigg to give an object a multiplicity of lives, encouraging the viewer to consider its materiality and purpose. This playful change— in the life of each object and the installations’ shifting forms each time they are installed— gives Rigg’s work a quality of lightness: being unbound, floating in time and space.

Her method entails negotiating the placement of objects until they are balanced by gravity. She sometimes reinforces the objects with tape or string, while also squeezing and stacking them. Blues in the Blender demonstrates this balancing act: plastic tubes zigzag in the air and nuzzle between other plastic objects; a yellow chain loops into an inverted umbrella; beach chairs stack on top of one another. Here, objects cannot be viewed in isolation. Each piece converges harmoniously and each is essential. Moreover, Rigg's exacting compositions communicate clarity and precision, even as they constantly evolve. It is this exactitude that allows her work to feel like a chain of events unfolding with powerful quickness: objects spilling to the floor, ascending and descending, converging and diverging.

The viewer is always an active participant, as seeing Rigg's work entails looking sideways, crouching down, and standing on tiptoes. It asks the viewer to circle the artwork and, for some pieces, actually enter them. In addition to this kinetic viewing the installations lend themselves to an entirely different realm of experience, one that goes beyond typical modes of visibility, or presentation of images. Rigg's work encourages the viewer to discover new shapes within shapes, new patterns within patterns, new images within images, new meanings within meaning. This level of interpretation removes the weight of what the artist wants her audience to know— instead, the viewer visualizes what is possible. In After the Victory Dance, one might see a spiderweb, the Sahara Desert, the inside of a birthday popper, a childhood dream. It is, above all, an imaginative type of visibility.

Calvino investigated literature as the millennium was coming to a close. While he wondered what would happen to literature and books in the face of technological advances, he felt confident that there exist specific "things that only literature can give us.” Focusing on the written word, Calvino made a case for the literary qualities closest to his heart and argued for why they should be saved. More than thirty years later, after technical transformations Calvino could barely have imagined have come to pass, Brianna Rigg’s inventive installations testify to these peculiarities’ continued relevance and power beyond literature itself.

—Karla Centeno, Director of Education and Engagement, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Centeno was a participant in the 2021 HereIn Writers Workshop.

Portfolio: Brianna Rigg

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